Theatre critic and author Michael Billington studied at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. In his second year he directed a production of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna, which was entered into NSDF 1960 after winning an Oxford drama competition. “Supremely confident” of his skill as a director and the certain success of the play, Billington was shocked by how badly it went at the festival. “It barely raised a titter and sank like a lead balloon,” he recalls. “The fault was entirely mine. I had barely re-rehearsed the show and, with the arrogance of youth, assumed all we needed to do was turn up.”

Billington remembers that the legendary Sunday Times drama critic, Harold Hobson - who back then was one of the Festival’s guiding lights and its sole judge - was “dismissive” of the show in the final awards ceremony. However, something else was afoot. It was Hobson’s final summing-up, conducted with a “masterly sense of drama”, (a tradition carried on to this day by the current chair of judge and Sunday Times drama critic, Robert Hewison) that first suggested to Billington that, in his words: “criticism was an occupation that required its own sense of drama as well of natural justice”. He says: “In my second year at Oxford, I couldn't decide what career to pursue: I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be a director or a critic.” By the end of the festival Billington had decided to follow in Hobson’s footsteps; in 1965 he started working at the Times as a theatre, film and television reviewer. In 1971 he became drama critic for the Guardian, where he has remained ever since. Of Hobson, Billington says simply, “he changed my life”.

Billington has attended NSDF as a journalist many times since that first experience in 1960, most recently in 2004. And it is more than likely that his ongoing commitment to theatre and his obvious passion for the subject will have inspired several young writers in exactly the same way that he was inspired, nearly half a century ago.

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